Requirement Analysis for Systems Supporting Research Communications in Various Disciplines

With the motivation of developing a system that sup-ports communications of researches in various disci-plines, this paper devotes to analyze requirements for such a system through operation of a prototype system. To develop a desired system, we clarify basic require-ments for the system, discussing what communications of researches are. We have developed a prototype sys-tem, based on a social networking system, that satisfies these requirements, offered it to our faculty members, and obtained some interesting findings which must be useful for the desired system. The findings include im-portance of identifiers which are opaque and can be se-lected by users instead of some centralized or hierarchi-cal organizations.